Wasn’t the H-bomb (fusion) supposed to be way more powerful and unpredictable than the A-bomb (fission)? Kinda confused here and I’m certainly mixing bombs with energy production. But if you could give me the essential I’d appreciate it. Thank you.
In: Chemistry
Fusion’s failure state is simply to stop working. Fission’s failure state is potentially a cataclysm.
Fusion would be a lot safer for energy production because it’s so much more difficult to achieve for this.
To get a fission reaction that gives you an overall output of power, the minimum you need to do is bring fissionable materials into close enough proximity to each other. It’s easy enough that we have evidence of “natural reactors” having existed where the concentrations of various fissionable materials in the soil or rocks was high enough. For fission power plants the complexity comes from balancing the reaction between “producing enough power to be useful” (which we achieve by concentrating the fuel) and “producing a runaway reaction that produces too much power” (which we do by cooling, introducing shielding between the fuel elements and moving the fuel elements apart).
Fusion is more difficult because you need to have a lot of energy going into the fuel in order to achieve fusion, and then even when you get energy out you need to have very tight controls on it to sustain the reaction. You need extremely high temperature and pressure within a near vacuum to realistically have a chance of a fusion reaction that puts out more energy than you put in over a sustained period of time. If any one of those things fails, then the fusion reaction fails, and you’re left with a small volume of gas with an incredibly high temperature. This would for all practical purposes cause an explosion. There would be an almighty bang, the reactor would likely be destroyed unless there was some sort of emergency system, but the overall explosion wouldn’t be particularly big as there wouldn’t be a huge total amount of energy involved. But if there wasn’t a containment building then the most dangerous thing you’d have to deal with would be fires started by hot bits of the reactor landing in the nearby area, followed by having to collect those parts or have the residents of the area have an increased cancer risk.
Fission reactor designs often have fuel sufficient for long periods of operation (months, potentially). There is potentially a large amount of energy to be released in the event of a problem.
Fusion reactor designs will (hopefully) not require a similar constraint.
No. Unfortunately, fusion is not a means for energy production. It’s possible that it’ll be possible in the future, but there are no ways to produce net positive energy from fusion in a controlled reactor
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